Twitter spam is back on my mind as I think about this morning’s TechCrunch report that Robert Scoble, the #5 most-followed Twitter user, has started tweeting paid advertisements. TechCrunch is shocked, shocked! to find out there’s advertising happening on Twitter, and alludes to speculation that Twitter’s founders will renege on a longstanding promise never to put ads on the Twitter website.
Some of this is driven by the fact that Twitter.jp, the Japanese-language counterpart, launched with advertising last month. Why ads on the Japanese version, but not the English? The conventional wisdom is that it’s harder to put advertising on the site later. That may be true, but of course, we already know that advertising happens on Twitter: many if not most of the accounts listed on TwitterBlacklist.com are primarily commercial in nature.
Which leads me to wonder, could Twitter ads be a partial solution to the problem of Twitter spam? After all, what these people are trying to do is reach many more people than their actual level of notability would attract. In lieu of other options, they’ve followed many more accounts than they could actually read, often using a bot to follow accounts automatically. How many of them would be willing to pay a small amount to place advertisements in the blank space underneath users’ left-hand sidebar? My guess is quite a few. In fact, so would quite a few others not presently engaging in spam-related activity.
One requirement for these ads could be that they must link to a Twitter account, which could then link out to where ever the advertiser wished. According to Valleywag, Twitter.jp ads do this, and it sounds to me like a fine way to keep the advertising conversational, like Twitter is meant to be. You know what isn’t conversational? A self-help guru whose promotions-only account follows 18,265 others with only 472 reciprocal followers.
Twitter advertising of this type would create an alternative to annoying other users with unwanted follower notifications while putting Twitter’s parent company Obvious on the slow road to profitability. Biz, Ev and Jack say they’ve been looking for a business model. Why not this one?
Just got an interesting spam “follower”, which tried to fool me into thinking it was a notification message (do I look like I was born yesterday?) inviting me to follow some get rich quick guy. The tactic appears to be to follow people with the fake account, which sends a notification via email, but get them to follow the “guru” account… that keeps the guru’s following:follower ratio nice and legit looking.
In fact, the link on the fake account goes to automatically add the guy’s other account (the link is twitter.com/friendships/create/username) if you are foolish enough to click on it.
We’re reaching that point where people try to be all tricky. Next up: attempts to get people to download viruses. Sigh.
I’m impressed by the cleverness, if not the ends to which it was put. All the more reason to find some legitimate outlet for commercial/promotional activity on Twitter.